Sam Biddle

Kazakhstan isn't the first country I'd associate with modernism and gleaming infrastructure, but according to photos from English Russia, I'm dead wrong: the Almaty Metro is gorgeous. And, shocking to any urbanite, gorgeously clean, like Star Trek with more maids.

The project—which only opened last month—took 23 years to construct, starting back in Kazakhstan's Soviet days. Now, it's full of eager passengers, smiling attendants, microchip-enabled fare cards, and tracks that look like you could eat off them. It's almost eerily clean. Especially compared to our New York Subway, where you're lucky not to witness human feces, let alone freshly-polished marble floors. One of the stations even shows a looped video of a rocket launch. A rocket launch! The future is Kazakhstan. [English Russia]